


in terms of who outlives whom this was never exactly in the stars

by HestiasHearth



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Suicidality, lots of general recklessness & survivor's guilt, suicidality: but only sort of. I wouldn't call it that but absolutely need to tag for it. take care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:19:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24533701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HestiasHearth/pseuds/HestiasHearth
Summary: Prompted bytatterdemalionAmberiteway back in November 2018, finally cross-posting from Tumblr to AO3. Check out some more responses to the prompt - shorter ones -here.Prompt: Signless reacting to someone else taking the approach with him that he usually takes with other people.AU in which the Dolorosa dies and returns as a rainbowdrinker a little bit later on down the timeline.
Kudos: 8





	in terms of who outlives whom this was never exactly in the stars

“Hey. Heyyy, friend. You don’t need this.”

His bloodpusher was pounding in his ears. It’s a miracle he heard them.

And that, that realization, is enough to entirely off-balance him, to snap him out of it enough with the sheer _what-the-fuckery_ of this situation because this _does not happen_ , to him.

So the picture in front of him forms in vague images and blurs, features popping out one at a time from a general, bleeding-together backdrop he’d stopped reading as a landscape, hyperfocused in on something else he’d already forgotten. Porrim is on the ground, bleeding. This has happened before, and she always gets up, he’s not sure what the problem is.

He remembers the problem as he comes into dim awareness of her blood already on his hands, which means he’s already touched her, and that was because he’d tried to restart her heart, and that was because her heart was not beating. He remembers, too, that there wasn’t enough to wrap, or stitch, or do anything resembling pulling together the pieces of her body, that whether she so much as had a bloodpusher left to restart was up for debate and anything below her shoulders was a lost cause. There’s never been any reason to assume she’s less mortal than any troll on Alternia, but he _did_ , because she’s fast, and she wipes his face while she helps him wrap her wounds, and she gets up.

He remembers what he had been saying, before he was jarred out of the headspace that was saying it. “They can fucking _kill_ me and take me with her, ‘s what they were after, this is a hate crime that’s picked the wrong fucking target, where are they.”

The troll speaking to him - just a couple sweeps his senior, wide brown eyes, work apron thrown over their shoulder and one glove still on, they’re a welder, he notes dimly - reaches the ungloved hand to rest at his arm, and he flinches away, so their hand drops. He turns away from them, speaking to the forest at large again-

_“HELLO! CULLBAIT HERE, I THINK WE SPOKE EARLIER, COMING TO YOU LIVE FROM– WHERE THE HELL ARE WE–”_

“You don’t _need this_ , buddy, you’re going to die and I’m going to die if you keep that up because I’m going to be standing next to you. What’s your name?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Easy, easy. I’m not asking to use it against you, you just told me you don’t have a title, I need something to call you by-”

“I don’t _have one_.” The frustration in his voice is evident and totally unmitigated, he wasn’t lying, he doesn’t have the time to sit you down and explain how it might be problematic that you would assume that-

“Okay,” they answer smoothly enough to cut the train of thought off. “Okay, friend, you bet. My name’s Orsyin.”

His pan whirrs for a few minutes. Mom is still on the ground and he can’t look at her for more than two seconds at a time, and it feels like a betrayal every single time he looks away. “Nice to meet you, Orsyin.”

“That’s nice of you to say. I know it’s not the best of circumstances, you don’t have to be feeling all too nice about me, right around now.” He laughs, and recognizes the tone of it distantly as shock.

“That’s a fair assessment.”

Orsyin takes off their other glove, stuffs it in the pocket of their apron, and walks around the Signless ‘til they’re at an angle that creates a choice: he can look at Orsyin, or he can look at Porrim’s body, but he can’t do both.

Recognizing what they are doing, and knowing how good it feels when it works- he chooses to face Orsyin.

“She was close to you, I can tell.” Signless takes in a stuttering breath, and despite everything they’re doing to keep an outward calm there’s a look in their eyes like they’re unsure if they’ve done something wrong, and he knows how hard they’re trying. He takes another breath, steadier.

“She raised me.”

“Oh.” They don’t look like they get it. Maybe that’s for the best, he thinks for a second, and then he remembers he’s already told them he’s cullbait, because he’s already announced that to anyone in a three hundred yard radius, because maybe if someone does hear him- paid assassin or threshie or more likely person whose frond he shook earlier tonight, who decided only after the sermon to track them down and couldn’t wait long enough for him to come back to camp and took it out on the wrong fucking person, or maybe he wasn’t worth punishing, maybe it was because she was the troll who was sinning and he was just the atrocious byproduct and now it’s because of his detrollianization that she’s dead, and which feelings about that can he _land_ on that remain about her-

_“Hey.”_

He looks toward the voice like he’s going to pass out. “You need to sit down,” Orsyin says.

“I do.” They give him their hands at a respectful distance and he doesn’t take them, still, so they give him the space to get seated, to get acclimated even just to the change in scenery and in space as he tries to feel less like he’ll throw up.

“You’re doing a very good job,” Signless offers, because he means it.

Orsyin doesn’t laugh, but does give a supportive little smile.

“Thank you. I do my best,” they reply. “Where are you from? Your accent sounds northern.”

He waved a hand. “Her accent.” Right. She ‘raised him.’

They nodded, and shifted enough to be in his line of sight again that he’d see it, but they weren’t meeting his eyes all the time anymore; they’d figured out they weren’t always going to get that back.

It’s probably a good strategy. Some trolls take that - looking you in the eye - as a challenge. Signless met their eyes for most of a second, breathing with them during it, just to make it clear that he doesn’t.

He’s looking less like a cholerbear under the glare of every blinding spotlight in a circus ring, now, and more like a confused, twitchy bird.

“Her accent.”

Signless, blearily trying to remember where that conversational thread had come from, nods.

Orsyin tries, “It’s okay, if, it’s a complicated question,” and they’re right on the nose about that. Signless could probably name the city he’d first lived in on a good night, and could definitely name the cavern outside of which she’d found him, but he was not really _from_ anywhere, and even if they _would_ feel like a good substitute something-to-say when they didn’t answer the question, none of those places were offering up their names.

“It’s a very long answer; I wouldn’t want to keep you all night.”

His voice feels alien, distant. Like he shouldn’t be having this conversation in this place, at this time, it shouldn’t be an option available to him, because the world has just ended, and Mom - sixteen sweeps old, thoroughly jade, and going to see him live and die in her lifetime at the rate they both saw him growing and molting like a lowblood, they’d both accepted it - is dead.

Signless draws a very shaking breath and asks Orsyin to repeat what they’ve said.

“I said that’s okay. I’m from Slogclout, I was only transferred here when the boss was.”

“You don’t have to be euphemistic.”

“That’s what we call him; that’s all. Hey, you don’t have to worry yourself over it, you’re worrying over enough tonight. I know you’re the kind who cares. I can read it on you without the effort- I mean, I can see the gears turning. It’s okay. One battle at a time tonight, friend.”

“…It’s very nice to hear you say that,” Signless replies after a moment, the significance of the word finally hitting him. “I’d like to make it clear that I would like to consider you a friend too,” because the word’s meaning has gotten muddled through the sweeps, but we know it means _person for whom I have companionable feelings_ and that its pathologization has destroyed or censored most of the linguistic history, but that doesn’t mean you kill a word.

You just make it, you know, mostly illegal.

“I don’t know what to do now,” Signless says, like it’s an appropriate thing to state so casually. Like time’s gonna keep moving forward now. Like this is a thing to accept, and thinking about it is a reasonable next step.

Orsyin nods, following that thread. “You got a place to spend the day?”

“Yes.” Signless blinks. “No. Half a mile from here. Not- alive, no, I’ll move. What-” He cuts himself off, presses his face into his hand with a breath out through his nose. Orsyin rests a hand over his, an enormous gesture from a stranger, and Signless’s breath stutters but he does not pull away.

“Okay, I’ve got a block,” they answer, tone consistent and assured like this was something they’d already agreed upon. “We can go now or we can sit here until you’re ready to move,” and their new friend is sobbing, now, and soon they’ve got one hand rubbing up and down his back by the heel of its palm, “but I don’t think you should go back home tonight, I think that was wise of you, you’re gonna be okay.”

Signless curls forward and shakes.

When he’s all cried out, they agree on where and when to move, and Orsyin helps him to stand, gripping their arm, and say goodbye. It’s not supposed to be a normal trollian instinct, because the idea is that being around bodies and death when you did not cause it means you’re likely to die next.

It really is, though.

So Signless kneels down, places a kiss to her forehead, fixes her clothes. This process gets more blood on his hands than before, and ordinarily he would care but now he’s silently intent on the idea that it would be disrespectful not to wait at least a full night to wash them. He doesn’t say this out loud, but they get to their destination, and Orsyin mentions the water spigot’s presence once, and, when he does nothing but glance at himself its direction and ask politely where he would sleep, doesn’t stop him.

The respiteblock is small, tacked onto a workshop, and the workshop itself is behind a metal fence that Orsyin had to key them into. Everything is brown soil and kicked up dust, and metal scrap lining the fences. They take a much longer path than it would have taken to reach this block in a straight line, but they don’t run into a soul. Orsyin seems not very free but not very interrupted (chipped somewhere, probably), and when Signless is offered the one recuperacoon in the block, he accepts it.

It would be two nights before he saw Porrim walking again. They were very, very long nights.


End file.
